The Feminist Promise

by Christine Stansell

  Beginning in 1903, the Pankhursts—mother Emmeline and daughters Christabel and Sylvia—shook up the British movement. The Pankhursts were a middle-class family of reformers from the north, loosely tied to labor and workingwomen’s suffragism. Their organization, the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), burst onto the scene when Christabel and another member heckled the Liberal home secretary at a 1905 election meeting. For well-bred ladies to stand up and scream in public, let alone at a high official, was riveting news. Over the next few years, the unrepentant WSPU whipped up a media frenzy with demonstrations of outrageous defiance, braving vitriol, derision, manhandling, and police brutality. Their tactics of enraged confrontation and wild civil disobedience pushed suffrage to the fore, provoked a series of showdowns with parliamentary Liberals, and revolutionized strategy throughout the world, including in the United States.44

  The WSPU was brilliant at channeling middle- and upper-class women’s convictions of superiority and selflessness into rebellion. Using a language of ladyhood, the Pankhursts transformed ideas about Christian women’s purity and nobility into justifications for daring and violent acts. Members could be womanly in their righteousness and at the same time wreak havoc—all for the greater good. At first there were degrees of commitment. For the nonlawbreaking, the WSPU staged colorful marches, playing to media spectacle—exposing oneself to the public eye, in itself a transgression. Members harangued crowds from soapboxes in the streets and parks and decked themselves in enchanting regalia designed by feminist artists (the multicolored sash the comically earnest suffragette Mrs. Banks sports in Mary Poppins is one artifact).

  The true militants, generally young and single, took on extreme challenges. In the 1906 election, the WSPU disrupted meetings around the country; after 1908, militants diversified to breaking windows of government offices, throwing acid at polling booths, chaining themselves to the Ladies’ Gallery in Parliament, hurling stones at the prime minister, tossing bombs, and setting fires at official residences. The point was to disrupt business as usual—to stage a guerrilla war—until women were no longer second-class citizens. Militants were arrested and convicted, went to jail, went on hunger strikes, and suffered force feeding. It was a spectacle of martyrdom at the hands of cruel men, amply covered by a press feeding on the melodrama.

  As the organization took on an increasingly authoritarian character, controlled by Christabel and Emmeline, it tightened into a cadre of zealots. In 1913, WSPU member Emily Wilding Davison committed suicide for the cause, hurling herself in front of the king’s racehorse at the 1913 derby crying “Votes for women!” In 1914, Mary Richardson slashed an Old Masters treasure in the National Gallery, Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus.45

  Most British suffragists deplored WSPU tactics, but the crusade nonetheless inspired activity across the board. New organizations formed, and the moderate, constitutionalist NUWSS benefited from WSPU defections. Working-class women in particular were appalled by the Pankhursts’ lawbreaking and what they saw as the self-indulgent theatrics of privileged women. By 1910 the WSPU was faltering, and in 1914, with the outbreak of the war, its pure politics of women’s advancement looked ridiculous. The constitutionalists, on the other hand, thrived. Open to male support, they moved into the Labour Party fold and the mainstream of twentieth-century British politics. At the center of the British Empire, suffragists believed their successes—not yet secured but certainly auguring well for the future—affirmed their enlightened predominance and set the bar for women the world over.46

  Outside Europe, in Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, ideas sped along lines of missionary influence, colonial rule, and indigenous independence movements. In the British colonies, temperance beliefs and assumptions of Anglo-Saxon supremacy gave women’s rights a moralizing colonialist cast. But colonized women also made the ideas their own, combined them with their own formulations, and pushed back. In India, for instance, women’s rights gained ground among women educated in British schools and those committed to the independence movement.47 Critiques of laws, customs, and institutions emerged—to be debated, denounced, and reworked outside the direct auspices of colonizers—in cities throughout the British Empire, but also in the Ottoman Empire (Istanbul to Cairo), Iran, Ceylon, Vietnam, Korea, and the Philippines. In Cuba, Argentina, and Chile, women protested civil codes that denied them elementary civil rights, such as choosing one’s own place of residence (separate from a husband or father). Where temperance was strong, the international authority of the WCTU could be called upon to amplify their protests. This was true in Japan in the 1890s, where Yajima Kajiko, the first president of Japan’s WCTU, petitioned the government to end officially sanctioned prostitution and promote monogamy—an act of considerable courage that courted violent reprisals from the brothel industry.48

  At the turn of the century and beyond, reformers and revolutionaries pushed for improvements in women’s education, an end to male sexual license (as sanctioned by law and custom), and increased female employment opportunities. They tied these measures to the goal of modern nations freed from foreign rule, feudal despotism, and religious orthodoxy. Education promoted female writing: Circles of journalists broached the new ideas in newspapers and magazines (sometimes in their own separate publications), novels, and in some places—Egypt was one—the semi-public, semi-private institution of the salon, a theater for outspoken women since eighteenth-century France.49

  Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879) flew around the world in translation for decades, a text that provoked discussions about the future of women wherever it touched down. At the end of the play, Nora walks out on her beloved children and the husband who both adores and infantilizes her—although she has no place to go. “I’ve been your doll-wife here,” she informs the bewildered man, “just as at home I was Papa’s doll-child.” Nora is an unlikely New Woman: She has no talents, skills, or ambition. But she enacts the fundamental novelty of New Womanhood: the claim on oneself. Facing her husband’s thundering admonition that she is a wife and mother before all else, she refuses: “I don’t believe that any longer. I believe that before everything else I’m a human being—just as much as you are … or at any rate I shall try to become one.”50

  The question was, what was going to happen to her when she walked out the door? Did the New Woman really have a future? Detractors thought not. The Japanese feminists in Seitosha (Bluestockings), founded by Hiratsuka Raicho in 1912, were derided as Noras, self-deluded and silly. Left movements considered the play worriedly. When the play was translated into Chinese in 1918, radicals debated the meaning of Nora’s actions. Nehru mentioned A Doll’s House in a speech to Indian students in 1928.51

  The divided response to Ibsen is one indication of the deeper ambivalence of anticolonial movements to New Women, figurative and real. Educated, modern women were necessary to independence struggles, but their challenges to male authority and traditional family structure were potentially disruptive, and a political liability with male supporters. One resolution was to summon up new varieties of national motherhood—a pattern of revolutionary imagination that, of course, went back to the American and French revolutions. Historian Afsaneh Najmabadi, writing about Iran, describes the arc elegantly. Despite women’s contributions, the universal citizen in whose name the revolution was waged turned out to be male after all. After the revolution, women were demoted, and pushed back into domestic seclusion, a vulnerable population in need of manly protection from the battles and stresses of modernity. In Iran, Egypt, China, Japan, and Turkey, motherhood in the service of self-rule and nation building pushed away the aggravations of modern women’s worrisome self-expression and autonomy. It was men, not women, who “were called upon at once to set the political injustices right and to reconstitute their manhood, to salvage national and sexual honor, to save the nation and manhood.”52 Yet women had an important role. They were to be symbols and upholders of the homeland and its traditions.

  In the early stages of revolutionar
y upheaval, competing forces were in play and women’s advocates had some room to maneuver. Because improved education could be so readily folded into model maternity, girls’ schools were typically the first reforms to overcome the hostility of traditionalists.53 By the same token, girls’ education was a prime target when reactionary forces took power. In 1919, for instance, the modernizing king of Afghanistan, Amanullah, angered tribal rulers when he inserted a tax on polygamy and provisions for girls’ education into the constitution he proposed; ten years later, after a trip to Europe and the Soviet Union, he banned the burqah and suggested, following Ataturk in Turkey, that women forgo the veil or wear a light covering. Queen Soraya, who traveled with him, adopted the Turkish veil. The king’s edicts on women were a major cause of his overthrow by religious conservatives, who demanded after the coup that women and girls who were in school in Europe and Turkey be called home immediately and that all female education inside the country cease.54

  Amanullah was unusual in his forthright enthusiasm. Male sympathizers were usually ambivalent, sometimes promoting women’s demands, sometimes opposing them. In the French mandate in the Middle East after World War I, colonial administrators gave the vote to men and struck a kind of bargain: The French took the upper hand in certain domains in Syria and Lebanon, but they stepped back from family matters, ceding men their governing role in the name of Islamic tradition.55 Everywhere that nationalists challenged European power, opponents undermined feminist claims by labeling them Western and promoting highly patriarchal family structures as tradition, belying the fact that on the eve of World War I, ideas slipped around the world too easily and transmogrified too often to be divvied up as native and foreign, East and West.

  In the Middle East, for instance, there was no simple opposition between Westernizers and traditionalists in the controversy over veiling. Arguments turned on what kind of veil (how much of the body should be covered), religious authority (who was to judge the matter), personal choice and health, and interpretations of Islamic law.56 In China, the case of footbinding shows how indigenous liberals and radicals took up ideas initially associated with the West and made them their own. Opposition to footbinding originated with Western missionaries in the mid-nineteenth century. Modernizing urban elites, Christian and non-Christian alike, responded and Chinese women added their own interpretations, so that by the early twentieth century, ideas of female equality coexisted with the belief that natural feet were a prerequisite for the efficient housewife whose domestic habits and goodness aided the nation. Anti-footbinding was a hard-and-fast principle of the 1911 revolution: The Nationalist government banned footbinding altogether and mostly ended the practice.57

  These global changes occurred at a distance, emotional and geographic, from the American suffrage movement. Insofar as the rank and file knew about women outside Europe, it was from the temperance movement and returning missionaries who spoke of the cruelties of exotic patriarchies. Polygamy, child marriage, and backbreaking toil were what they assumed to be the lot of foreign women. When they considered their sisters in faraway lands supposedly so much less advanced, they plumped up an enhanced sense of their own efficacy in the face of a stultified political situation. Leaders returned from IWSA conventions abroad filled with pleasure at the spread of women’s rights, but international awareness was filtered through the same worn-out leadership and tired ideas that held it hostage. Still, momentum elsewhere fostered a sense that women’s rights had forged a partnership with modernity. The question was how to ride these energy currents to victory.

  CHAPTER SIX

  MODERN TIMES

  Political Revival and

  Winning the Vote

  THE ADVENT OF the new century marked a sea change in feminism. We are in a new era, when assumptions changed drastically about differences between the sexes, human sexuality, the place of the market and paid labor in the life course, the obligations of marriage, and the legitimacy of male governance. Woman in the Twentieth Century, her rights and wrongs, possessed resources and rights that existed only on the far horizon for the generation born before the Civil War. By 1900, many of the demands broached at Seneca Falls had been tentatively won: college education, access to the professions, eased restrictions in property rights, child custody. And in 1920, American women won the vote, the prize finally gained after seventy years of work.

  It happened because the suffrage movement changed. A younger generation churned the political waters, turning a polite, ladylike movement into a confrontational, contentious one. A new cultural style darted through the ranks, mixing the staid ethos of NAWSA with an urbane, resourceful sensibility. These newest of New Women spoke not so much about women’s rights but about the human race, labor, democracy, and “feminism,” the latter a French word gaining currency in the English lexicon. Indeed, this is the moment when “feminism” replaced the more cumbersome “women’s rights” as the designation for emancipation. Feminists saw themselves as world changers, the insouciant young replacing the stolid Victorian matrons who had led women to a dead end.

  These New Women turned suffragism into one of the largest and most diverse democratic forces in the country’s history, strikingly different from the teetotaling civilizers and small-town uplifters who had until then dominated NAWSA. Socialists, trade unionists, African-Americans, immigrant radicals, and rebellious ladies of leisure joined in coalition with middle-class professionals, college graduates, and housewives. The enthusiasm was contagious, blending a romantic hope for transfigured class and sexual relations with an American faith that the new century would heap liberty and beauty on those loyal to modernity’s promise. Liberals and progressives who ten years earlier would have been cool to the suffrage issue rose to the excitement of a different movement.

  A string of male pundits proclaimed the value, importance, and necessity of votes for women. Walter Lippmann, a golden young man of liberal journalism and a card-carrying socialist since his Harvard days, wrote in The New Republic that a great and welcome change between the sexes was in the works. Lippmann advocated a no-more-nice-girls policy, a brief for the New Women. Change would not come as long as women did what they were supposed to do: “dancing well, dressing well, becoming adept in small talk, marrying an honest man, supervising a servant, and seeing that the baby is clean, healthy and polite”—so long as women were, in a word, nice. “They have to take part in the wider affairs of life.”1 This was what votes for women meant to one of the nation’s most astute analysts in 1915: no longer a mildewed moral crusade, but a zestful demand made by emancipated women who were bound to transform not only their own lives but American culture and politics as well.

  The newcomers to the suffrage fight were as likely to be gripped by issues of labor, poverty, and class as they were to be engrossed by the woman question. Many saw votes for women as an end to other causes. As the pace of urban reform quickened in the first decades of the century, left-leaning progressives searched for ways outside moral reform and charity to bridge the gap between the haves and the have-nots. Trade unions gained their support, and the Socialist Party attracted some, including idealistic college students and graduates. Urban settlement houses drew middle-class women interested in building a different kind of America, one that treated workers and immigrants as fellow citizens to be respected as well as helped.2

  These overlapping milieus supported convictions about the rights of labor, the justice of the eight-hour day, the abolition of child labor, and regulation of women’s working conditions, as well as the need for public parks and better housing codes. Between individuals and groups, the emphases and priorities differed, but what united them was the belief that the cause of women’s emancipation could not be separated from other goals. Theirs was a feminism that was part of a broad democratic push. Until now, feminism in the United States, unlike its British counterpart, had few ties to working-class constituencies. Now they proliferated, to the great benefit of the suffrage movement.

  In the public m
ind, suffragism’s representative type was this generation’s New Woman. Newspaper and magazine articles, cartoons, and silent films utilized the standard formula of New Womanhood—assertiveness, education, lofty goals, indifference to men, and plain clothing—but added twentieth-century enhancements: athleticism and physical daring, political acumen and diligence, and a penchant for adventure and travel. The New Woman imagery responded to and at the same time helped constitute a feminist avant-garde. Beneficiaries of much-enhanced opportunities for college education and slight openings in professional work and the arts, the self-described New Women of the early twentieth century tended to be college graduates who aspired to professional and vocational standing—lawyers, social workers, journalists, actresses, writers, and editors.

  The association with labor was fundamental to this generation’s understanding of women’s need for productive work. “As human beings we must have work,” advised Harriot Stanton Blatch, who came into her own in these years. “We rust out if we have not an opportunity to function on something.” The public position was a principled disdain for domesticity. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Home (1903) turned an acerbic gaze on woman’s sphere and found it to be an incubator of selfishness and antisocial sentiment—indeed, a barrier to the development of the human race. “It hinders, by keeping woman a social idiot,” and the enterprise of supporting unproductive wives wore men down. Gilman called for cooperative kitchens and child care, to release both sexes from the torpor. Echoing Gilman, the South African–born Olive Schreiner’s Women and Labour (1911), a sensation in Britain and influential in the United States, maintained that housewives risked turning into parasites. Modern homemakers had no social utility except as childbearers, since manufacturing and technology had taken over traditional domestic manufactures and the schools raised children. To regain usefulness in human progress, they must find work, and it would inevitably be work in men’s sphere. Gilman and Schreiner still honored the maternal position. Race progress—an ostensibly universal term detached from racialist meaning—could be furthered by mothers, but only if their circumstances allowed them to act with dignity acquired through education and financial independence.3